In modern, network-based environments, organizations often produce and utilize vast amounts of software and computer code for day-to-day operations. Organizations may therefore maintain or even develop software with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of individual functions, collectively. Such functions may require access to sensitive resources within the organization and may have the ability to perform irreversible actions on these resources. Therefore, if certain pieces of software fall into the wrong hands or are inadvertently misused by an employee, potentially devastating data loss or security breaches may occur. For example, such software functions sometimes include hard-coded credentials to perform operations on a target resource. If an attacker hijacks or otherwise obtains the code, even slight modifications could provide the attacker with access to highly sensitive data or the ability to perform malicious operations. Accordingly, security and management of this code can be of critical importance to the organization.
To address this risk, conventional techniques focus on hardening security for access to the code itself. For example, organizations may implement security requirements, such as privileged account access, multi-factor authentication, or various other techniques to limit unwanted access to the code. While these security measures may provide some protection, they are not failproof, are inflexible, and are difficult to scale with increasing volumes of code. For example, many of these techniques rely on the prudence of individual employees, which presents a potential security flaw and practical limitation. Further, while these measures may inhibit access by attackers, inadvertent modifications to code by entities within the organization can still be devastating.
Some other techniques may attempt to monitor software within an organization. But the vast amount of code each software application includes, and the ever-changing nature of the software, may prevent an organization from accurately determining which software presents the greatest risk. Further, it may be hard to prioritize which code should be protected in which order and to what degree.
Accordingly, in view of these and other deficiencies in existing techniques, technological solutions are needed for automatically detecting and addressing security risks in code segments. Solutions should advantageously allow for code to be assessed dynamically as it is developed or modified within the network environment. A secure, flexible, and scalable solution should identify risk based on an analysis of software at the code level and should be based on a number of factors indicating the potential for harm flowing from the code. The assessment of software code should also occur at a granular level, allowing analysis of smaller portions of code to improve efficiency and accuracy. Further, effective technological solutions should allow for customization of the calculated risk level based on features of the network environment.